Exhume
by BlackxRose19
Summary: Forever only lasts until he has the crown on his head and her blood on his hands. Hans/Elsa


**A/N: **Hello! This is my first contribution to the wonderful Frozen fandom. This was written for the 1sentence Community at LiveJournal; this is theme set Gamma.

Warnings: Contains a mild reference to self-harm, a couple instances of dub!con, and the frick frack. Also contains extreme abuse of the rules of grammar.

This is all over the place; some of these are related to the movie and some of these are, obviously, AU. _Italics_ are dialogue, most of the time.

* * *

**.ring.**

He hooks his finger around the delicate silver chain that disappears under the neckline of her dress and pulls, takes the ring that hangs from the end of it into his hands and runs his thumb across the snowflakes imprinted on the band; _I didn't think you'd keep it,_ he murmurs and she blushes, looks away, stammers, _Y-yes, well, it looked e-expensive so I couldn't just throw it away._

**.hero.**

She stopped believing in fairytales long ago, back when she first realized that no prince was going to come and save her from herself, and as she hears the soft whispered clang of metal, she _knows_, knows for certain that they aren't real; sometimes you're the villain in your own story and the hero is the one with his sword against your back.

**.memory.**

In the haze of consciousness that exists between the moment she slams to the floor and the moment black begins to fuzz the corners of her vision, she seems to remember a warm hand brushing her hair back from her face, gently touching her cheek, a low voice murmuring _It'll be okay,_ but when she wakes up she's in chains, in prison, in the town she has single-handedly destroyed and she figures such recollections of kindness must be a dream.

**.box.**

_I don't much like gifts,_ she says and he laughs once, sharp and forced, _So I've heard,_ pushes the little white box gently back into her hands when she tries to return it, and whispers _But you should keep it, you don't even need to open it if you don't want to._

**.run.**

His eyes take in the way she shifts from one foot to the other, the way she never quite uncurls her left hand from its tight fist, the way her right hand never leaves the comforting coolness of the door handle, and he laughs, dead and hollow and humorless_, Go ahead and run, Queen Elsa. I hear it's what you do best._

**.hurricane.**

Hans walks in one day to find the wardrobe splintered to pieces, mirror shards strewn across the floor, ice covering every available inch of the room; a silly quip-_Jesus Christ, Elsa, did a storm blow through?_-waits on his lips, but when he sees her in the corner, curled into a ball while sharp, jagged icicles form over her head, the laughter dies in his throat.

**.wings.**

It's the demons in her mind, the ones that blind her with self-loathing, that sink their claws into her neck and whisper _you'll always be this way, no matter what you do, you'll never deserve Anna and she deserves better than you,_ that send her running to his door at night, seeking solace in a man who knows what it's like to be a monster.

**.cold.**

He wakes her up with a sharp nip to her earlobe and rolls away, groaning _Can you please stop your feet from being so frigidly cold? _And she laughs dryly, plants her equally freezing hands on the back of his neck, and murmurs, _Possibly, if you can stop stealing all the blankets._

**.red.**

Her nails bite into his back, scratch and scrape until he feels his skin tear, until he feels the blood begin to drip; he'll look into the mirror in a few days, see the red, swollen lines that crisscross over his flesh, and _smile._

**.drink.**

Hans discovers that Elsa becomes very open to persuasion once she's had a few drinks, so he keeps the wine coming, placing fresh glasses into her hand the moment the old glass is empty; it's easy to tell himself, when the word she sobs into his neck sounds like a little too much like _Stop_, that all she needs is a little…forceful encouragement.

**.midnight.**

She clings to him tightly, muffles her tears into his chest, and worries that this is too good to be true, that at any moment the clock will strike twelve and things will go back to how they were.

**.temptation.**

He lies her down, secures the shackles over her small, frail wrists, and tries to ignore the tiny voice in his head that tells him that_ this is wrong_, that he should just _let her go;_ he brushes her hair back from her face and finds a blanket to drape over her shoulders, but he didn't come this far to let _her_, of all people ruin his dream.

**.view.**

He thinks she's prettiest like this, when she gets down on her knees and takes him in her mouth, all teeth and tongue and red, red lips, and he tangles his fingers in her hair and thinks he could get use to this.

**.music.**

His piano playing isn't the best, but whenever she sings, he dutifully sits beside her and plunks the keys, relishing the small way her lips twitch at the corners when he hits a particularly bad note.

**.silk.**

He lies with such smooth, practiced ease that she wonders how anyone with even half a soul could possibly be that way.

**.cover.**

He isn't expecting anyone to be standing outside the door, so when he runs headfirst into Anna, all he can muster is a weak _I, uh, I got lost!_, and she raises her eyebrows, crosses her arms over her chest, and smirks, _In my sister's bedroom?_

**.promise.**

_It'll only hurt a little_, he murmurs into the shell of her ear and she nods and offers him a shaky smile, trying to ignore the well of panic bubbling in her chest, trying to ignore the burning pain and the blood between her thighs, trying to ignore the _smile_ on his face when she starts to cry.

**.dream.**

They're both cursed, he to be the youngest, most unwanted brother –_lucky number thirteen, right?_-and she with her powers of ice and snow, and for this reason he is able to close his eyes and pretend that they are equals

**.candle.**

He finds her in the portrait hall late at night, standing in front of one of the paintings-Anna's favorite, not that he would know that-face illuminated by a flickering flame; _I didn't think you would come,_ he whispers, and he tries not to read into the way she shifts away from him, the way the tendon in her jaw clenches as she breathes, _I almost didn't._

**.talent.**

He's good with words, good at exposing nightmares and worst fears, good at twisting the truth, good at prodding a person's weak spot until they're left crumbling beneath the poison that drips from his lips, good at turning his face away and pretending it doesn't bother him when she starts to cry.

**.silence.**

She sees Anna frown from across the table, sees her eyes shift, knows that the red marks that are already bruising across her pale throat have no chance of going unnoticed by the younger girl, and she braces herself for the anger, the betrayal that will come her way; but when they're afforded a moment alone, Anna says nothing, merely stares at her unfathomably, and in some ways, the silence is worse.

**.journey.**

The Southern Isles sends two of its princes to Arendelle to apologize for their brother's actions, and though Elsa vows to greet them in the coldest, most detached manner possible, when they kneel in front of her and look up, they have the same eyes, _his_ eyes, and she can't flee the room fast enough.

**.fire.**

He crosses to her, crosses to where she sits in front of the hearth_; And here I was, thinking the beautiful Snow Queen would melt if exposed to heat,_ he chuckles and even as he wraps a quilt around her shoulders, his laugh brings shivers up her spine.

**.strength.**

She can freeze an entire kingdom with her magic and thaw an eternal winter in a matter of minutes but it only takes a few words from him to break her into pieces.

**.mask.**

He lets his façade slip just long enough for her to see the scared, neglected little boy he must've been once (_before this, before the years of growing bitterness, before Anna and Arendelle and the snow queen_), and then he smiles, all teeth and malice and hollow, dead eyes, snarling _As if it mattered to you._

**.ice.**

He watches her, notices that the prevailing harshness in her blue eyes only ever softens when she looks at Anna, and wonders what it would be like to have her look at him that way, too.

**.fall.**

_Why didn't you just let them kill me?_ she asks, and he doesn't know why he decides to do this, why he decides to tell her this, but it feels _good_, it feels good to hurt her, feels good to watch the color and the _hope_ drain from her face as he leans close and whispers, _That chandelier was meant for you, Elsa._

**.forgotten.**

She has just one sibling, one sister who is willing to leap in front of a sword and _die_ for her, and Hans looks at his_ twelve_ brothers and knows _none_ of them would lift a finger.

**.dance.**

He sweeps Elsa into a waltz before she can refuse and as they move across the ballroom, working their way between the other couples, she snaps sourly, _I can see why my sister fell for you;_ he laughs and pretends that it's a compliment.

**.body.**

She'll make such a pretty little corpse, spread out on the ice like a bloodstained martyr, red slowly leaking into her pale hair, and he licks his lips and draws his sword and _he can't wait._

**.sacred.**

He kisses her scars, each and every one of them, even the ones that mar the inside of her thighs _(it's easier to punish yourself where other people can't see_) but he can't fix the wounds that crisscross over her heart and over her mind, the ones that will always be buried underneath her skin.

**.farewells.**

She comes to him on the last night of his temporary imprisonment in Arendelle to go over last minute details of his departure; ten minutes later, she's pinned against the wall, legs wrapped around his waist, breathing hot, shallow moans into his ear and he thinks this might be the best goodbye he's ever had.

**.world.**

He lets himself feel bad, just for a moment, that he's about to take one last thing from someone who's already lost everything else.

**.formal.**

She greets him the next morning looking every bit the part of the poised queen, gloves on and hair wound in a tight bun, but he smiles, remembering the way her blush spread all the way down her body, the very unladylike things she moaned when he curled his fingers inside her, the short, breathy noise she made in his ear when she came, and he knows that he'll never look at her in quite the same way.

**.fever.**

His mouth burns a hot trail down her jaw, her neck, over the swell of her breast, over the jutting peak of her hipbone, nips and licks until she's sure she'll look down and see scorch marks on her body; the bruises and the bites fade after a few days, but she knows that he's marked her forever.

**.laugh.**

_I'm sorry, wait, what?_ And Anna has to slap a hand across her sister's forehead, monitor her for any sign of fever or illness or, like, brain-dead stupidity, because she refuses to believe that Elsa's _I think I'm in love with Hans_ could actually be the truth.

**.lies.**

He crashes their lips together, hard enough to bruise, pulls away, snarls _You can't look me in the eye and tell me this meant nothing to you,_ but she does, locks blue to green and whispers in a voice barely restrained from shaking, _It didn't…and this changes nothing._

**.forever.**

She snuggles into his side, mutters a soft, _I hope we can be like this forever, _and he nods and drops a kiss onto the top of her head, but for him, forever only lasts until he has the crown on his head and her blood on his hands.

**.overwhelmed.**

When Hans finally gets down on one knee and proposes-much like he must've done with Anna, she allows herself to think bitterly-the gesture is so unexpected that Elsa squeaks a _Yes!_ followed by a _Wait, no_, flip-flops back and forth for a few minutes, and finally settles with a _Yes, of course,_ whispered into a kiss.

**.whisper.**

Her fingers ghost over the rapidly purpling bruise that covers his nose-courtesy of her sister-but all his hope for any kind of sympathy dies when she looks up and mutters _You deserved so much worse._

**.wait.**

_Elsa, stop!_ and Anna's hand is grasping her wrist (and isn't this just so eerily familiar?) and her eyes are pleading as she whispers _You don't have to do this, we don't owe him anything!_; Elsa shakes her head and detaches herself from her sister, because yes, yes she does, she owes Hans her life, like it or not.

**.talk.**

Talking to Hans is useless, Elsa realizes, because he's mastered the art of speaking _at_ her, not _to_ her, and rarely listens to anything she has to say in return.

**.search.**

She remembers looking to him in desperation, fingers clenching and unclenching, trying to fight the wild animalistic anger that springs up in her chest, searching for some hope of salvation in the eyes of this man she hardly knows.

**.hope.**

He advances towards her, voice flat and hard; the eyes that she pleaded into not more than an hour ago – _You have to tell them to let me go!_- are dull and cold and she realizes what a fool she was to think that she deserved sympathy from anyone.

**.eclipse.**

She feels his shadow fall over her, closes her eyes, and waits for the end.

**.gravity.**

She protected Anna from this man by refusing to bless their marriage, but as he grips her hips tight in his fingers, she laughs and realizes that no one is around to bless her decision to make this mistake.

**.highway.**

She tries to find something in his face, something in his impenetrable gaze that lets her know that this will all be okay, that's she not making the biggest mistake of her life, but he just smiles and grabs her hand and leads her down a path that she knows will only lead to her own destruction.

**.unknown.**

The tentative, shaking hands that skim over his body and the searching look she gives him as her fingers play with the button on his trousers make it very clear to him that's she never done this before

**.lock.**

She's spent years trying to keep her emotions in check, _conceal don't feel don't let it show,_ so it strikes her as bitterly unfair that it only takes him a few minutes and a few well-aimed snipes to undo all her hard work.

**.breathe.**

His voice is hot in her ear, whispering _everything will be all right,_ and for some stupid reason, she lets herself believe him.

* * *

A/N: Thank you for reading! How did I do? I have potential ideas for upcoming Iceburns stories, provided that this one is received well enough. :)


End file.
